[Wikipedia] August 23: Jake Gyllenhaal

[Faraaz Damji]

   Jake Gyllenhaal is an Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning
   American actor.  The son of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and
   screenwriter Naomi Foner, Gyllenhaal began acting at age eleven, and
   his career has seen performances in diverse roles.  Gyllenhaal's first
   major film appearance was in 2001's cult hit Donnie Darko, in which he
   played a teenager troubled by psychological problems.  In the 2004
   blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, he portrayed a student caught in a
   cataclysmic global cooling event alongside Dennis Quaid.  He then
   played against type as a frustrated Marine in Jarhead (2005) and, that
   same year, won critical acclaim as a "gay cowboy" in the controversial
   but highly lauded film, Brokeback Mountain.  Gyllenhaal has taken an
   activist role in supporting various political and social causes.  He
   appeared in Rock the Vote advertising, campaigned for the Democratic
   party in the 2004 election, and has promoted environmental causes and
   the American Civil Liberties Union.

Read the rest of this article:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Gyllenhaal


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Today's selected anniversaries:

1305:
   After a show trial, William Wallace, leader of the Scottish
   resistance against England during the Wars of Scottish Independence,
   was executed in Smithfield Market, London.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace)

1839:
   As it prepared for war against China's Qing Dynasty, an ensuing
   conflict that became known as the First Opium War, Britain captured
   the southeast Asia port of Hong Kong.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War)

1927:
   After a controversial trial, and despite worldwide protests,
   Italian-born American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed via
   electrocution in Massachusetts for the charge of murder and theft.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacco_and_Vanzetti)

1939:
   World War II: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to the
   Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a 10-year, mutual non-aggression treaty that
   was eventually broken when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union two
   years later.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact)

1989:
   Baltic Way: Approximately two million people joined their hands to
   form an over 600 km (373 mi) long human chain across the Estonian,
   Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet republics during the Singing Revolution.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Way)


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Wiktionary's Word of the day:

   cheval de frise: (military) An obstacle made of wood with
   spikes, for use against attacking cavalry.
   (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheval de frise)


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Wikiquote of the day:

   It matters not how strait the gate,
   How charged with punishments the scroll,
   I am the master of my fate:
   I am the captain of my soul.
   -- William Ernest Henley
   (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Ernest_Henley)